The Next Generation of Photo Book Lives and Breathes Online

Nothing beats flipping through a big book of gorgeous photos printed on high-grade card stock, but The Bastards Book of Photography, released this week, shows that a completely digital existence has its advantages as well.

For starters, the book is published on the geeky blogging platform Octopress, which allows for a customizable structure; it's kept in a repository on GitHub, an online version control system that allows anyone to make and submit changes; and its creator, Dan Nguyen, is assembling parts of the book, like the photo EXIF data, programmatically. Oh, and it's also completely licensed as Creative Commons Non-Commercial.

"This is kind of a rough draft," says Nguyen. "I just wanted to put something up while I continue to work on it."

The text of the book offers clear and simple explanations of camera mechanics and purchasing advice for beginners with chapter titles like, "Why Even Buy a Camera?" and "Photography is for Anyone." Nguyen's own Creative Commons photos pulled from his Flickr feed demonstrate the topics he discusses, with the helpful EXIF data populated automatically on the page.

Nguyen works at ProPublica and is a rare combination of journalist, photographer and hacker. He wants to bring the problem-solving mindset of programming to the world of photography. The title of the book, and that of his previous book about programming, The Bastards Book of Ruby, comes from a quick-and-dirty approach that tries to get to the heart of the matter without getting too technical.

Future additions to the work, he says, will include scripts that dynamically generate galleries of topic-appropriate photos, like night photos in the section on night photography, or photos taken at specific ISOs in the section about digital light sensitivity.

"This book would've been really frustrating to do if I didn't know how to program," says Nguyen. While photography and coding seem like disparate disciplines, he sees plenty of opportunities for the two worlds to collide. "I'll go out and shoot photos to take a break from programming, but I'm also someone who thinks programming can be used for a wide variety of informational thinking."

The project started as a tutorial for a friend who wanted to start taking his own photos for his business, but has grown far beyond its roots. If well-maintained, the site could become a top photography resource for beginners to learn from, and experts to contribute to.

Nguyen hopes that the book at least gives a concise rundown of the barebones of photography and the different trade-offs of manual settings. "You don't get something for nothing, it's an artistic problem solving in your head while you're using your camera," he says.

"For me the book is an experiment to see what the essential big-picture concepts are for producing great photos and for appreciating the work that goes into great photography."